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Live blog: Climb for Costa update, Froome and Uran hit the dancefloor, catching the bus Dafne Fixed style + more
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Wed, Nov 07, 2018 08:36
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Jack is group editor across road.cc, off.road.cc and ebiketips, overseeing all three sites in the F-At Digital group to make sure everything’s up to scratch. He’s been writing about cycling and multisport for over a decade, arriving at road.cc via 220 Triathlon Magazine in 2017. He worked across all areas of road.cc including tech, news and video, and also contributed to ebiketips before being named editor of road.cc in 2021 (much to his surprise). Jack has been hooked on cycling since his student days, and currently has a Trek 1.2 for winter riding, a beloved Bickerton folding bike for getting around town, and an extra beloved custom Ridley Helium SLX for fantasising about going fast in his stable. Jack has never won a bike race, but does have a master’s degree in print journalism, and two Guinness World Records for pogo sticking (it’s a long story).
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Latest Comments
Rendel Harris 13 minutes ago
@Paul J More information has come out today which indicates that the riders did not believe that the conditions were fine, apparently a lot of the roads were extremely slippery (this seems to have been a problem throughout the race, presumably due to dust caused by the excessive heat) and so the many hairpins had become hazardous. Secondly the riders felt that the nature of the circuit made it impossible for any riders suffering a crash or mechanical to get back on as the peloton would be so strung out and it would take so long for assistance to reach anyone in need. Decathlon rider Sander de Pestel told journalists that in his opinion a GC rider wouldn't be able to get back on even if they had an incident at 40 km to go. Take that with a pinch of salt or not as you wish but those two sound like quite legitimate reasons for the riders to be concerned.
Geoff H 16 minutes ago
@Chris RideFar ..... and the first thing they do is crank that throttle all the way! WHOO HOO!!! Look at me go!!!
Terry Hutt 35 minutes ago
I wish I could commute to work but my house is 5000' above where I work :-( That's 1500 meters for you metric types. Good article.
mctrials23 2 hours ago
I'm honestly amazed that horse riders dare take to our country roads. I have no idea what the actual statistics on collisions are but they are very slow moving, often 2 abreast and generally on the little twisty turny country lanes. With the way far too many people drive on these tiny roads, I wouldn't dare be on a horse on them. On my weekend ride this week a pickup driver (shocker eh) nearly crashed into a poor lady head on because he simply couldn't wait until it was safe to overtake. Poor womans ABS kicked in and she had to go into the side of the road to avoid him as he barrelled on through and she still only missed him by inches I reckon. All because too many people don't care. If he hits her he will have a crash on his insurance but he almost certainly wouldn't be banned despite it being a fucking braindead overtake that he clearly does as a matter of course. He is a danger on our roads but we will never treat him as one until he kills or seriously hurts someone and we can prove he was completely at fault. Even then it will have been a "one off" according to his lawyer. A lapse. About 2 minutes after this near miss a BMW flies past me giving me plenty of space and gently drifts back over to our side of the road. He was going about 45 and was on the wrong side of the road going around a blind corner while he drifted back in. If someone else doing the same speed was coming around that bend he would have binned it into the hedge or hit them. The mind just boggles. Absolutely zero reason he didn't pull back in faster. Just didn't occur to him I assume. This is why it scares me on our country roads. Far too many drivers who are just fundamentally dangerous, bad drivers.
Smoggysteve 2 hours ago
There needs to be a change in the language used when reporting on things like this. If there is ever an incident involving a cyclist it is very much dehumanised. Cyclist = Inanimate object. Not a human being, with family and loved ones. its all so easy to make them look more like a statistic. The more people who understand that cyclists are real people just trying to live their lives and and not just an obstacle or inconvenience then we might have people treating them the way you would wish to be treated.
Paul J 2 hours ago
@OnYerBike Hmm, and when I click the links to "preferred partners" for a small sample of items, they are not found on the preferred partners sites. So... seems it is now defunct too, as you surmise.
Paul J 2 hours ago
If the riders want a parade lap, then let the organisers set an officially neutralised parade lap. If some of the riders just don't want to race, then that's between them. They don't get to badger the organisers to neutralise the end of the race. And anyway, if they take final GC times at X km to go, that just sets the race to end at X km to go. If a GC rider really wanted to, they could try attack before then (course, it would lack the course feature advantageous for getting away that the riders wanted excluded.. but still). The riders trying to bring in safety, when conditions were fine and the circuit was also fine, is just going to undermine their voice in the future when they try bring up safety the next time. Stupid.
mjvande@pacbell.net 2 hours ago
@james-o Yes. The mountain bikers are still breaking the law. I saw two more yesterday.
mjvande@pacbell.net 2 hours ago
@james-o Yes. The mountain bikers are still breaking the law. I saw two more yesterday.
Rendel Harris 2 hours ago
@panda I don't think there would be a problem with maintaining a GC truce, because it only has to be maintained until the times are taken. In the case of Paris, everyone could ride in fairly easy, couple of parade laps up and down the Champs, times taken, and then if after that Pogacar wants to tow Del Toro round three laps of Montmartre, or indeed go for the stage himself, no worries. I too am of the generation when the organisers held that sort of sway, nothing like as important now when 90% plus of the top riders' salaries come from the team rather than prize money, indeed I believe it's customary for the winner nowadays to give their prize money away to the rest of the team. This is, I believe, a good thing; although rider power can sometimes appear a bit excessive in its demands (the main reason for asking for neutralisation yesterday, as explained by the rider representative, seemed to be "we're all knackered", which was pretty ridiculous) at least organisers can no longer dictate that they must go on in dangerous circumstances. As they were saying on commentary yesterday, what they need to do is for the rider representatives and the organisers to get together as soon as, or even before, the route is announced and iron out any problems then instead of waiting until the eve of the stage or even, as in stage of the Giro this year, to complain about the parcours while it is in progress.
18 thoughts on “Live blog: Climb for Costa update, Froome and Uran hit the dancefloor, catching the bus Dafne Fixed style + more”
Given their pricing I think
Given their pricing I think the idea is a DOA. £1 unlock + 20p a minute. £5 for a small journey – bargain!
Just get a bike.
Those e scooters were
Those e scooters were featured on BBC R4 news yesterday, quite an extended piece, detailing all the environmental benefits etc; longer than they have spent discussing the overwhelming greater benefits of cycling in the past thirty years. The BBC apparently has a blanket ban on even mentioning the incredible benefits of cycling, and the recent phone in on the You and Yours prog barely mentioned them, only when callers said how good they had been.
Given the overwhelming benefits of cycling, congestion, pollution, health, obesity etc, one might think that it would be front and centre of any item about those subjects, but it is never mentioned by the BBC. If anything else had half the benefits of cycling, they would be all over it 24/7/365.
The rest of the media is barely any better.
Crocs yes, but where are the
Crocs yes, but where are the pink pyjamas?!!!
Cue the usual late middle
Cue the usual late middle aged men braying about what people should be doing.
One less person on a toxic fume emitting mode of transport is good by me. I have no problem with the scooterers I’ve come across on the roads. Leave your crab in a bucket mentality alone and mob up with potential allies against the death cage lobby instead.
roadmanshaq wrote:
Which scooterers were these, considering they are illegal to use on the road?
Wait until someone kills an OAP on the pavement then you can talk about ‘death scoots’ instead of ‘death cages’ . There’s nothing fundamentally dangerous about cars…..unless you don’t control them properly. Same difference.
You’ll never win against the ‘death cage’ lobby anyway. It’s a multi-billion pound industry. Scooters….not so much.
It think the most telling part of scootering is you look like a bellend. Maybe if you’re one of radical kids that pop barspins and 360 on normal manual ones. Being a cyclist puts you into a lower social grouping so god knows what using a scooter does to you unless you’re a hipster.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
What a load of garbage. Cars and other motor vehicles kill thousands a year via fumes and particulates alone. You’re just completely ignorant of basic environmental health and there is no point continuing a chat with someone so clearly proud of being a blustering, anti intellectual fool.
roadmanshaq wrote:
Considering that one of the complaints often used against cyclists is “bl00dy stupid adults playing on their toys”, with a failure to see bicycles as a valid form of non “toxic fume emitting mode of transport” and with a commensurate loss of status as a road user, exactly how far down the ladder do you think using an e-scooter will put you?
And, as YW rightly says, how long until some e-scooterer knocks someone down (whether or not its their fault) and the Tabloid Hounds are let loose on them…??
brooksby wrote:
Thinking that you’re ever going to win the public argument by appeasement is the worst fallacy there is. The suffragettes and civil Rights movement didn’t get their way by meekly soliciting the media’s OK and only a fool would think that method would work re rididng our society of the tyranny of the death cage.
roadmanshaq wrote:
Considering that one of the complaints often used against cyclists is “bl00dy stupid adults playing on their toys”, with a failure to see bicycles as a valid form of non “toxic fume emitting mode of transport” and with a commensurate loss of status as a road user, exactly how far down the ladder do you think using an e-scooter will put you?
And, as YW rightly says, how long until some e-scooterer knocks someone down (whether or not its their fault) and the Tabloid Hounds are let loose on them…??
— roadmanshaq Thinking that you’re ever going to win the public argument by appeasement is the worst fallacy there is. The suffragettes and civil Rights movement didn’t get their way by meekly soliciting the media’s OK and only a fool would think that method would work re rididng our society of the tyranny of the death cage.— brooksby
Excuse me?
My point, I think, was that many people already think that cycling is too dangerous and wouldn’t dream of cycling in with motor traffic, so how many people do you think would want to mix it with motor traffic on a scooter (even one with a LiOn battery for a motor)?
My other point was that cyclists=”evil runners down of poor pedestrians” in some corners of the media, and that all that vitriol would come crashing down on e-scooterists too as soon as there was the slightest hint of “Oh, well they nearly run me down, they did!”.
And as a final point, though I do take on board that we need to get people out of their cars, I’m still umming about e-bikes at present (got buzzed by one on my non-electric bike recently) so e-scooters are for me a bit of a step too far.
Final, final point, is that I’m really not sure that campaigning for cycling infrastructure or for alternatives to the motor car is truly comparable to the suffragettes or the civil rights movement. I understand the analogy, but…
brooksby wrote:
— brooksbyGiven that you exhibit complete ignorance of the harm caused by motor vehicles in pollution and maiming of normal people in their thousands, every year, I will not sweat your small minded Benedict Arnold chasing down of ebike riders and scooterers.
Get your priorities right.
roadmanshaq wrote:
Don’t be a middle aged brayer telling people what to do, mob up with the potential allies against the death cage lobby instead, and then tell people what to do.
These scooters have been
These scooters have been noted to have been left in really awkward places where they’ve been deployed in the states – partially blocking pavements, right next to crossings, and on street corners, for a few examples.
At least with these, they’re going to be a shape and size where I can easily chuck them out of my path if they’re in the way of my wheelchair – Obikes etc are way too bloody heavy, I usually end up just shoving them aside.
I have no problem with them in principle – anything to help bridge that last-mile gap and coax people out of cars – but like bloody sodding sandwich boards, if they’re taking up pavement in such a way as to present a navigational hazard to MI and VI pedestrians, then they shouldn’t be there and should be removed, before somebody either gets hurt or, ehem, accidentally damages them with their wheelchair.
Plenty of people in London on
Plenty of people in London on scooters of all sorts, skates, rollerblades, skateboards and even electric skateboards, all just getting on with it. Law needed to change ages ago. Anything that gets people out of their short-distance car journeys.
General Motors competition –
General Motors competition – I name this bike, “Fugly”
I think they need seatbelts,
I think they need seatbelts, airbags, numberplates, riders to wear helmets and Sa-vile’s wardrobe… then yes.
Actually, having not seen them i may be wrong, but the thing that would concern me is the wheels. Are they big enough to tackle the average pavement…
“GM are branching out and
“GM are branching out and have developed a folding e-bike… and presumably after a creative block in the boardroom they’re now asking members of the public to give them a hand naming it.”
Has “Too lazy to walk” been taken?
I do not think brooksby is
I do not think brooksby is ignorant of any of the things that you accuse him of there, perhaps you should read some of his other posts.
I also don’t think that the legality for escooters sits anywhere close to votes for women or the removal of the Jim Crow laws.
Segways never managed to be legal, nor did the hoverboard craze, these escooter people had better have very deep pockets, the Tory party don’t come very cheap.
Yes because you’re a fool –
Yes because you’re a fool – he literally claimed ‘cars do no harm’ in this same page ignoring the deaths and injuries caused by air pollution.
I have a right to not choke on toxic fumes and die a premature death, how about you start sticking up for yourself instead of rolling over for the death cagers like a tame dog. Scooterers are allies against the institutional ruination of our breathing gases.